Narrator: Darrell N. | Iowa, USA
We had a concrete silo we no longer used. After a storm I heard water running inside it. There shouldn’t have been any pipe in there, but farms accumulate things nobody remembers fitting.
I opened the little side hatch. The inside wall was wet. Water ran down it in a narrow stream from somewhere above my light.
I called to my son to bring a better flashlight. My voice came back from inside the silo before I’d finished the sentence. Same words, same irritated tone. A second ahead of me by the end.
I stopped. The voice carried on, adding, “Don’t bring the boy.”
Water hit me in the face. I shut the hatch and drove a screw through the latch. The stream was clear but smelled like the muddy bottom of a pond.
My son thinks it’s funny that I’m afraid of an old silo. He’s thirty-two now. I let him think that. There are worse things for a son to believe about his dad than that he’s become jumpy with age.
